So long and thanks for all the fish

It’s sad to read of Amy Winehouse’s death. She was a very talented singer, with a truly great voice.

Already her death is being written into various tropes: one being the ‘curse’ narrative of the ’27 Club’:

…the culture-defining musicians like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Janis Joplin who all died at the same young age as Winehouse…

There’s a mythos at work here about the price paid for exceptional talent.

Unfortunately, a lot of the commentary is glib, mixed with barely concealed derision. So I was very glad to see this post from laketothelight at Mostly Snarling:

This is the thing about madness/mental illness/non-neurotypicality. Presuming it is negatively impacting your life and stopping you from functioning in a way that is healthy for you, presuming it is actively making itself a problem – well, dealing with that in the current social framework we have is tricky.

I feel like Amy was failed, and so too all the other self medicating, not-coping individuals out there. She didn’t fail, she simply didn’t make it, because she was caught up inside a brain that – without adequate help – wouldn’t let her do so.

Every time a ‘star’ dies, I get angry at how we either glamourise their death or deride it. How about this – despite all their money, exposure and connections, they’re still human beings trying to make sense of a world that’s hard to negotiate. Sure, they have a lot of privilege. But mental illness/madness doesn’t pick and choose targets, and if you’re ill, there’s not a lot that money can do to help you.

It can’t make medications work for you, or make you want to take them. It can’t give you a supportive family or a close network of trusted friends, and might actually work to destroy that I’m imagining. It can’t make you a health care system which – even at its best – will deal properly with mental health.

Most of all, it can’t change a culture which boils a young woman with legitimate mental health issues who is wildly self medicating to cope and struggling with addiction, down to a glib “bitch be crazy”.

There’s a gendered dimension to discussion of Winehouse’s travails. Contrast the aspersions cast on her – as if she were an uncontrollable child-woman – with the hero myth Jim Morrison was inscribed into.

Winehouse’s struggles will have been compounded by the world she found herself in. Her death should stimulate us to reflect on how some of the myths surrounding mental illness have a cruel instantiation in real lives, and on how all too simple dichotomies contribute to our social failure in providing care.

predicted her demise – a demise taking place before the media and revealed a certain complicity in it on behalf of the tabloids, high fashion which glamorised the embodied distress of the singer – and, yes, us the buying and listening public who knew what was coming. You read this article retrospectively, unable to avoid the fact that you were told about it years ago and you get the feeling she was aided and abetted in her hurtle to the grave by so many forces from without as well as within.

In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.

Ted Hughes “The Shot”

I wish someone had caught Amy in flight. Contrary to all the fatalism – it was certainly avoidable.

Mark – you mention mental illness, but I wonder if too much money too fast and the music lifestyle was the bigger factor. Richard Fidler did an interview of Mark Chapman (song writer/producer) and he mentioned how many good singers/bands fell apart because of the money/drugs/lifestyle.

I just gotta say that of course we are complicit, every day we continue to support these stupid utopian drug laws, that are rooted in denial of science, that make drugs more dangerous, that make their purveyors rich that corrupt our law enforcers and turn them into the morality police.

It was a vicious circle. Those buzzards, the paparazzi and tabloid mags/newspapers, would fall over themselves to publish the most humiliating possible pictures of Amy. That *must* have contributed to her demise. I can’t see how it couldn’t have. How could that constant, unrelenting personal public humiliation not have done so? It was part and parcel of the same mindset which hacked Milly Dowler’s phone. Bastards.

Without disputing the central argument I have to take issue with a couple of Mostly Snarling’s points.

“If you’re ill, there’s not a lot that money can do to help you.” I respectfully suggest this is utter rubbish, as anyone with mental illness and addiction who has tried to get past first base in the public health system will tell you. Buying services, in Australia at any rate, is ONLY way to ensure access, however inadequate those services may be.

The other point (and this really aggravates an already raw sensibility) is that supportive family and friends may be essential to the sufferer’s long term survival, but they are by no means sufficient. Sooner or later, loved ones reach the point where they either step back and love from a distance, or collapse under the weight of someone else’s needs. There is no substitute for owning your own problem. None at all.

“Well, I think that she just wasn’t able to make the transition into becoming an adult, basically. ”

Did you happen to read this bit of the post?

“There’s a gendered dimension to discussion of Winehouse’s travails. Contrast the aspersions cast on her – as if she were an uncontrollable child-woman – with the hero myth Jim Morrison was inscribed into.”

The coverage on the SBS and ABC news tonight, btw, has almost entirely been about the ’27 Club’ and suchlike blah.

What is an ‘adult’ in this context anyway? To suggest that everyone always reaches some sort of state of happy stasis is surely misleading about the truth of everyone’s lived reality, I’d have thought.

i am just very sad that amy had no one to turn to. In our lives we can come to know that we are special, unique and the world needs someone just like you. All you have to do is let someone know you are there and that you need them to listen, laugh, dance, and share all there is about you so they will know just who you are, and some may find that they love you.

While I’m sure there is a gendered issue here, re: Jim Morrison vs. Winehouse, I suspect it’s also a factor of living in a certain age. An age with social media, the internet and an attitude towards drug taking which is vastly different to the one at Morrison’s death. If Morrison was around today he would likely be seen as a more talented Pete Doherty – the coverage of Doherty was quite similar to that of Winehouse.

@Nick, I’ve been thinking about how social media and the 24/7 news cycle might be playing into this. But I agree with you that the impact is still gendered – the patronisation, the scorn, the infantilisation – I still think that all that directed at Amy Winehouse is not likely to be directed to a comparable male. The representation of the male of the species as a tortured artist, blah, blah – I suspect that’s a constant.

We might actually have devolved a bit since the days of Morrison and Joplin. A hypothesis is starting to posit itself about the rise of insta-media and the anti-feminist backlash!

No1 Son turned 27 this year, and last time we spoke, he was a little down … I suggested he come home, and he muttered something about loose ends, but at the time I was troubled. Reading of the 27 Club didn’t help.

Everyone seems to have assumed that Amy’s death was caused by an overdose. And while this may indeed prove to be the case, she did have other serious health issues like emphysema which may have contributed to her demise.

That being said, I feel the the scorn and derision some are heaping on her is fueled by the misconception that fame, money and sucess should automatically mean stability and happiness. Also, a society which clamors for 24/7 celebrity coverage and whose members seek and clamor for fame for fames sake at any cost, happily cackles with glee when those who have achieved a measure of such stumble and fall. The rich and famous are given no quarter when their eccentricities and foibles cast them in a negative light and bring them problems.

Just as alcohol doesn’t MAKE you do things, but merely releases ones inhibitions, thus exacerbating personality traits and allowing one to do things they normally wouldn’t, money, fame and fortune also magnifies personality traits whether good or bad, and simply gives the celebrity the means and opportunity to succeed or fail on a much larger scale. Amy already had issues. But once Amy Winehouse the woman became Amy Winehouse the brand and the industry, those issues were magnified in the spotlights glare and, lacking the proper support, she collapsed under the weight of her own celebrity. She became a self fullfilling prophecy of her own characture. She failed as she WAS failed.

I’m sorry for all of the people who loved her that she left behind, but I’m not really sorry for her as she basically lived her life off of drugs and alcohol, so my condolences to those who love her but I really can’t find it in my heart to feel any sympathy for her. Pity? Yes. Sympathy? No. Does that make me heartless?

Oh you aren’t sorry for anyone Tintu, that’s just your segue into your sanctimonious judgement on those who cannot handle drinks and drugs, coated by not sorrys within the sorrys, and pity (and derision and scorn) towards a dead woman, whose demise you use to arrive the the main subject of your comment – you. No one cares if you are heartless. So, it not being about you, perhaps you might then also understand neither did the post call for a judgement on Amy Winehouse but rather raised the question (to use Camille Paglia’s term) of the dionyisian mythology enfolding the famous and the subject of mental illness.

Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s. Some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill.

We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.

One of the first rules of conversation is to ask yourself whether your audience needs to hear what you have to offer. Your expressed want of sympathy for a dead person is of no use at all to the people who can hear it — the living — because there simply is no useful response available to that audience. All they can do is feel pain, if they pay attention to the remarks at all.

With that in mind, I wonder why you spoke at all? Were you merely venting recklessly? I’m not sure you’re ‘heartless’. You’re more like the cultural equivalent of a driver who simply drives about the road on the assumption that everybody else should clear a path based on your whims. Your words seem to be mostly about your feelings rather than those of anyone feeling loss.

youtube killed amy whitehouse! if i had seen myself (at my worse, filmed making a drunken mess of myself) my self esteem would make it spiral more out of control, I understand her, so sorry she has pased on, but maybe to a better place.